A Colombian Army officer charged with multiple civilian
killings, known as “false positives,” this month publicly charged the commander
of the U.S.-assisted unit – General Javier Fernández Leal - with collaborating
in the killings. Fernández Leal has been promoted to chief of joint
intelligence for the Colombian military.

The accusing officer, ex-captain Antonio Rozo Valbuena, served
in a unit created in 2006 to combat kidnapping (known as GAULA for its Spanish
initials) in 41 counties in the northern department of Córdoba, but its members
ended up kidnapping and killing civilians themselves.

In March 2006, then-president Álvaro Uribe was resting at
his ranch when Major Oscar Acuña, commander of the anti-kidnapping unit, reportedly
ordered the killing of five civilians, according to Rozo, in order to “stand
out” for his performance. In “Phoenix
Tactical Mission,” a paid civilian recruited two of the youths under the
pretext of working on a nearby farm, but on the way there they were detained by
soldiers and shot at close range.

Acuña received training at the School of the Americas, not once
but twice, in 1992 and 1995, including a course in leadership and counter-drug
operations. He was sentenced
in June 2009 to 28 years in prison for the killings, but a second court in
Córdoba overturned
the conviction in 2010.

Rozo is under
investigation for seven other similar crimes. In one of them, he and five
other soldiers are
accused of killing two civilians on March 12, 2007. According to family
members of 19-year-old Fabio Enrique Taboada, the youth was working as a
bricklayer’s assistant when he was contacted to work on a farm in the area. He
was then reported as a member of organized crime killed in combat, but
Colombian prosecutors determined that there was no combat.

“When a soldier gets hit with charges and says, ‘I did it, I
killed him, my colonel knew nothing,’ it’s a lie,” said
Rozo Valbuena. “To do a false positive requires a logistical train, a very
broad intellectual capacity to be able to set it up and plot the procedure
well,” he said.

The 11th Brigade in Córdoba, of which the GAULA
unit was part, was commanded by then-Colonel Fernández Leal from June 2005 to
December 2006. Three months before ascending to command the 11th Brigade, Fernández Leal was studying at the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania,
where he
wrote about the costs of the war in Colombia.

The United States assisted the 11th Brigade
during this period and beyond – in 2005, 2006 and 2007, according to a
State Department list of assisted units (pdf, 1.6MB)

Fernández Leal subsequently sat on a military panel that in
2009 stymied investigations into false positives, according to statements by
the former Army Inspector General to U.S. Embassy officials, revealed in a cable published by
Wikileaks.

Earlier this year, Fernández Leal was revealed
to have ordered the transfer to the military prison on Tolemaida Army Base
of a notorious army captain convicted of attempting to kill a Colombian
congressman. The captain attempted to escape from Tolemaida, which was the
center of controversy earlier this year because convicts apparently came and
left freely, and the luxurious conditions for soldiers convicted of civilian
killings and other human rights crimes.

Rozo also pointed the finger at Colonel Juan Carlos Piza,
director of the Tolemaida military prison. Piza was commander of the “Juan de
Corral” battalion, of the Fourth Brigade in Antioquia, in 2004 and 2005 –
precisely when at least a
dozen civilians were reportedly killed by soldiers in the battalion.